“At community colleges, adults can acquire the skills and credentials they need for the workforce and new jobs,” Bailey said. “But the traditional associate’s degree doesn’t fit very well for adult students” because many enter with weak academic skills, have less time and incentive to invest in general education courses, have difficulties adjusting to traditional schedules, and state funding policies can work against them since it’s often influenced by the traditional college student model.
“So we need to change how adults get their credentials outside the traditional model,” he said.
Bailey said adult education programs need to be flexible and training-focused and include certificates as well as non-credit instruction.
Dr. Barry Sheckley, the Ray Neag Professor of Adult Learning in the Educational Leadership program at the University of Connecticut, has been learning how adults learn for 30 years, studying how the brain retains information and uses content to develop effective learning experiences for older students.
Adult learning, he said, reaches a plateau once a certain amount of information is grasped. To push past that point, Sheckley said the environment must change to outside-the-classroom activities.
“One way to improve the innovative capacity of our workforce is to develop workers’ ability to transform knowledge for use in solving new problems,” he told symposium attendees.
